Pulling My Strings
by kyokoaurora
Summary: Dramione from Ron's POV, anti-RonHermione. He wanted to make her his perfect woman, but she ended being someone else's...and it's all his own fault.


Disclaimer: Don't own Harry Potter

**~o~**

We were meant to be.

That's what they all said. The perfect couple, the bookworm and the Quidditch fanatic, like pepper and salt, polar opposites but neither ever without the other. Not even Trelawney's self proclaimed apprentices would have disputed that certainty.

But they were wrong.

Perhaps it is my own fault, all the way. I am, in most respects, wholly to blame for this caricature of obscene proportions that has replaced the image we expected to see. But I like to believe that somehow, it wasn't all my doing that led to this.

Perhaps he was a deciding factor too.

I was the second youngest in a family of seven, with one younger sibling. I was the one who got the shabbiest clothes, the most tattered schoolbooks, the well worn toys that my roughhousing brothers had wrecked beyond recognition before they ever reached my hopeful clutches.

Even my sister, as the only girl, was spoilt to a degree.

Not me.

I was the afterthought of the family, when the Head Boy's, and the pranks and the premenstrual cramps had been dealt with, then my feeble difficulties might be addressed.

It was something that grew to eat away at me. A child with the bitterness of an adult, who had they been paid a meagre ration of notice more than the considerably more interesting and greater sources of pride that were his siblings, may just have accepted his fate.

Alas...

She was a new thing to him, something the likes of which he had never yet seen. A glorious mirage of wild hair, with incisors sizable enough to be called unseemly, and an unvarying thirst for knowledge and recognition.

You were just like me.

For the first time in my life, I had the power.

Every unjust insult, every slight to your social skills, every criticism of your appearance and passions, made me just a little bit stronger. It didn't matter who else put me down, you were always there to help me, inadvertently, to feel good about myself, at your own expense.

I became so used to this routine, even after we became 'friends' of a sort. You would give and I would take, your help, generosity, patience, I would leech from you, with only the possibility of reciprocating that kindness keeping you bound to me. It was the only way I knew to keep you, the only thing that had ever been truly mine.

My possessions were someone else's first, my appearance was indicative of which family I belonged to, my best friend was the darling of the entire wizarding world before he was anything to me.

The only thing that somebody else didn't beat me to...was you.

I considered you mine, and my jealousy would rear its ugly head when anyone threatened to take what was mine. It was out of no great concern for your comfort or safety, but that another would hate you, or love you.

I saw you first.

Over the years I seemed to calm down, become more rational, but still remain the same gluttonous chauvinist you claimed me to be. But inside I was as possessive as ever.

It only got worse when I perceived a threat to my supremacy as the most influential figure in your life.

Without your notice, almost without mine, until his image and persona were so well ingrained in your psyche that your attention to me would never take full precedence again, he had become as important to you as I was.

Draco Malfoy, the prince of Slytherin.

Everything that you hated, that Harry hated, that every decent, hardworking, loyal to the light witch or wizard abhorred unquestioningly and unfailingly, he represented.

A poster boy for evil, I had commented once, gaining her wandering focus for a scant moment and drawing forward a surprised laugh before she once more succumbed to the fiery rage your actions had fanned within her.

How it pained me.

I couldn't defend the right to solely possess that which was mine, or I would lose it. When my care turned to spite, you still managed to capture her disgust and disdain in a way I never could.

I wanted all of you, your love, and your hatred. I craved everything you had to offer.

I tried to control you, to manipulate your emotions, to sway your decisions, to make you what you should have been to my mind.

My perfect toy.

But as my broken heart has found, a puppet is only as good as the subtlety with which its master operates its strings.

You broke your strings.

I had made the mould, and he had broken it.

You found that his passionate detestation for all that you were more sincere and constant then my changeable moods

You found that his wit and command of language was more of an exercise for the colossal intellect I forced you to restrain then anything I could throw at you.

You found that his ability to change was greater than my own, I had broken you, and he had retaliated on your behalf.

And you found that he was so much more worthy of your love than I, when he righted all he had done wrong, and I, while innocent of any crime, had quivered in cowardice while he aided our side.

So I shouldn't be shocked, angry, confused, for I have no right to be. I had picked up the role of puppeteer, had been too careless and rough, and broken the strings which bound you.

And although it has taken too long to allow me any comfort now, I think I've finally realised, it's someone else's turn to pull the strings.

And as he smirks, less maliciously then he used to, but full of the self same satisfaction he will always have, an arm wrapped around your curvaceous figure, fingers splayed and caressing your back gently through the ivory silk of your gown as he twirls you around to dance floor to the applause of all present, I realise something else...

It is now their turn to pull my strings to the time they desire, for the puppeteer has become the puppet in the theatre he built.

And this time, nobody will cut my strings.

**~o~**

Basically, Ron was always powerless and never thought of first. Hermione became his first friend, and allowed him power over her feelings and sometimes actions, as I see it. Eventually she and Draco helped each other change and now he has to watch them be happy. It's their wedding day if it's not clear enough.

Thanks for reading!


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